The actor Helen Mirren has lamented that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain did not live long enough to be able to experience the excitement of tracking his location on his phone.
Speaking to the Evening Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev on his Brave New World podcast, Mirren, 79, said she considered herself lucky to have lived long enough to witness dramatic technological advances.
“I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did,” she said, “because he never saw GPS, as it’s the most wonderful thing to watch my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.”
The actor has frequently referenced Cobain in the past when discussing the interface of technology and ageing. In 2014, she told Oprah Winfrey, “Look at Kurt Cobain – he hardly even saw a computer! The digital stuff that’s going on is so exciting. I’m just so curious about what happens next.”
The following year, she told Cosmopolitan, “I was thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day and he died without knowing the internet, and I’m totally blown away by that.”
And, in 2016, she told the Daily Mail, “If I’d died at 27, the age that Kurt Cobain died in 1994, I’d never have even known there was an internet! Incredible things are happening all the time and I can’t wait to see what comes next.”
However, the sentiments Mirren expressed this week to Lebedev – whose podcast focuses on “longevity, neuroscience, biohacking, and psychedelics” – were less cheerful. “From this point on,” Mirren predicted, “however long humanity survives, it will be a world of technology. And I’m so grateful that I was of a generation that knew the world before technology. And you know we will die out eventually.”
Ageing in the public eye, reflected Mirren, is “kind of OK” but “it’s not brilliant”. She continued: “But it wasn’t that brilliant to be 25 either. So it’s not a question of seeking youth at all. It’s a question of living the life you have as fully and positively and enjoyably and confusingly and everything that it was when you were younger. It’s just called life.”
A year before Cobain died, Nirvana recorded their Unplugged in New York set for MTV, which further popularised the band beyond their core grunge fanbase. A now-iconic photo from the early 1990s shows Cobain grinning broadly while talking on a brick-like mobile phone, suggesting he might well have been enthusiastic about Google Maps.